Whil-

What's better than posts about note taking apps and note taking methodology is meta posts about note taking apps and note taking methodology!

More seriously though, it's a very central topic to the software world since many things in this world deal with how to work with information. And note taking is a very central thing when working with personal information.

Cruelty, meaning to intentionally inflict pain and suffering, implies the sensation of said pain and suffering in the subject. Pain and suffering are (personal) conscious or subconscious judgements of sensory input. So to be cruel you must assume the subject you are cruel to can (1) feel sensations and (2) decide if the sensation is painful or inflicts suffering.

My take on the assessment of pain is that any entity with some self sustained direction (in life) will be able too suffer or feel pain when faced with sensations that signal an obstruction to that direction. If the entity is able to self correct the path after such sensory input, I claim that the entity can experience pain.

With that in mind: A calculator has no self sustained direction. And no sensory input to help with self correction either. So it naturally cannot feel pain.

A chicken has a self sustained direction. It lives (moves on its own) and at least want to continue to do so. It also has the ability to self correct when given sensory input. So it can feel pain, and you can (given the reasoning above) be cruel to chickens. Even without an assessment of whether the chicken is conscious or not.

To be conscious, to go into that as well, is in my book to be able to use reason and to be able to reflect on things. So that new sensory inputs are created and assessed based on other already experienced sensory inputs. I.e. to be able to self adjust ones path (in life) seemingly, from an external observer, without any new sensory input.

With that definition one should be able to construct experiments with chickens to decide whether they are conscious or not, or merely acting subconsciously, autonomously.

With that definition of consciousness it should also be possible to define an AI that is conscious. And given the definition of pain above, it should also be possible to inflict pain on (and be cruel to) an AI. The morality of inflicting pain on different subjects is a different story though... :-)

Cheers

For the ones looking to do the same: https://opencollective.com/logseq

Definitely would be great to see this project gain mindshare and funds. Also, for the ones who wonder what it is they reach when clicking the link for this "Show HN", there is an about-post here: https://logseq.com/blog/about

Very useful I must say. I have a bunch of those with different filters on points. Means the same article will show up multiple times but in more and more exclusive feeds. This removed my FOMO quite nicely!

I guess we all have an incentive to make you go out of business then ;-)

On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools.

That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.

What are public companies if not people?

It seems to me what you're complaining about is less about Microsoft and more about capitalism and greed in general.

This is without up to date fact checking so take this with a grain of salt, but during the last housing crisis I remember looking this up and came to the conclusion above. I don't actually know if it's universal but it was valid for Sweden at that point in time. I think the key word in your text above is "expenditure", where a house maybe isn't seen as an expenditure but rather an investment..?

When taking about inflation it's also always good to remind one self that the pool of money also changes. And the fact that housing usually is connected to mortgages, which in turn expands the amount of available money. But this paragraph has nothing to do with your comment so I'll just stop there!

Housing prices normally aren't a part of the inflation calculation.

This argument is really important actually. The design pattern to separate the data from the application solves it. And org-mode has done that in a way as the data is in text-files. But it's not marketed like that. We should really see org-mode as two parts:

- Org-mode data format

- Software implementation that understands the data

  - Emacs

  - ...

The syntax is very well thought out as well. Specification here: (https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html)

Maybe it's a bit late to hope for wide software adoption for the org-syntax. Markdown has in a way taken that space already. But... I'm still hoping! ;)

This post resonates with me. But mostly because we've come to equate tools with data. And that "tool = data" mindset (in my view) is the reason for having this problem to solve in the first place.

If the data for a particular need of mine was in a standardized format, it wouldn't matter which tool I used as I could switch at any point in time.

The post mentions Excel as the go-to tool. What I would have liked the author to be able to say instead is - "use spreadsheet-data as the first data-container for the data needed". If a better data-format, more specialized for my need exist, migrate to that instead. The tool to interact with that data should be the secondary choice. Something that could be reevaluated at a later time if needed, without loosing past data due to lock-in effects.

I'd say mindmapping is an inferior term for describing org-brain even. Concept mapping is better. But that term is also already taken for something else. Org-brain and thebrain provide another organizational system. It's closer to graph databases (but more restricted with only three kinds of relations). The way it mimics our natural way of thinking about stuff is really helpful. Few tools help us easily capture those relations. Often we're stuck with pure hierarchical systems (such as mindmaps or folder structures). So I look forward to seeing this org-mode add-on evolve and truly hope that this way of organizing information gets more widespread. And covered in more tools and on more platforms.

Double thumbs up to Kungsgeten!

Low credibility on this article. Mostly just an advertisement/personal opinion piece. Move along everybody. :-)

Btw, speaking of algorithms, this post was at top 40 on https://news.ycombinator.com when my comment was added. Is that a global state or a personal state configured just for me? :-) (hoping for the former)

Isn't this just a natural evolution following the fact that we're optimizing how to make money instead of optimizing how to make ... "good"? As long as we fight over the resources we want and need we're going to have technology applied by people in ways to optimize their own share. In a global market with little regulation, ethics very quickly gets thrown aside unless that said ethics is important to the consumers. Since in this case it's even difficult to see the ethical problem, how can it be improved without changing the first principle of operation (I.e. that we optimize making money I.e. our own share of resources.)?

It seems a bit premature to say that PowerShell was passed over. The journey outside Windows has just started.

Indeed, PowerShell is onto something. Such delight it is to work with. Especially when you start to build your own tools for it.